Making Informed Choices That Move Us Beyond Our Default Future

The choices we make today will determine our future, and the choices we made in the past have defined our present.

When it comes to delivering major change, research suggests that we haven’t always made the right choices. All too often we hear stories of programmes overrunning or, in extreme cases, being cancelled.

Is this caused by organisations not ‘doing things right’, or not ‘doing the right things’?

In my view organisations have, over the past 20 years, got much better at doing things right. Developments in project and programme management, change management, process management and service delivery have all helped organisations get better at doing things right – but not necessarily doing the right things. Doing the right things is essentially about making the right choices: choices on what to start, stop, retire, reshape and reschedule.

In the following presentation I share a point of view on how organisations get better at doing the right things by developing a capability based upon shared mental models, frameworks, language, processes, tools and beliefs. A capability that supports and documents the process and discipline of choosing what the enterprise has chosen to do – and by implication chosen not to do. The payoff of having such a capability can be significant as it eliminates the waste resulting from initiatives that were always destined to fail.